South Korea’s never-ending repertoire of Korean drama never fails to bring multitudes of audiences to their screens. Its pay-TV’s continuous growth in IPTV is flourishing, with an expected exceed revenue of US$7 billion by 2020. Many global dramas are still entering the market, with some being localised. Zenith Media expects the global advertising market to grow by US$77 billion from 2015 to 2018, with Indonesia in fourth place contributing to 5% of this extra advertising expenditure. A slight change is also expected in the ranking of the world’s largest advertising markets from 2015 to 2018, where Indonesia is expected to replace Canada as the 10th largest advertising market.

IPTV

IPTV was introduced to the country in 2009. Since then, the only three IPTV operators, KT Corporation, SK Broadband and LG Uplus have continued to grow at a healthy pace. Media Partners Asia (MPA) projected that they would have added a combined 1.65 million new customers last year. The IPTV market in South Korea is expected to exceed US$7 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of over 11 per cent, according to Technavio. This may be due to the enhanced interactivity features being inserted, such as streaming advertisements for shopping during regular programming. Interactive services such as telephony and smart browsing are also becoming more popular, pulling consumers towards IPTV technology. Advanced technology that facilitates multi-screen viewing is also another factor to the steady growth of subscribers for IPTV. The increasing penetration of IPTV into the market among fibre TV internet subscribers in South Korea is expected to be the main driver of the growth of the market during the forecast period.